Thank you for teaching me this new word - sclera. I can only return the favor by telling you that Sorin's pupils are black just like normal people. Pupil is the black hole at the center of the eye. The colored portion is called "iris", and that is the light colored part in Sorin's pictures.

The pupil is not actually black, it is a hole into the eye's inside, through which light enters. So in order to have a non-black pupil there needs to be some light reflected from the red insides (red eyes due to flash photography), or one must have some sort of light source inside the eye (which is very possible for a being like Sorin with his... erm... unlife essence glimmering through his eyes).

--Kartal T.

Dear Doug Beyer,

I was wondering if you could clear up some of the confusion about "basic" versions of planeswalkers? It seems most of the planeswalkers who've gotten cards so far have gotten at some point a "basic" version, which is distinguished by having the card name just be the name of the character -- though as with Elspeth it isn't necessarily the first version that gets printed. I was wondering -- firstly, is this actually deliberate, or is this pattern that I'm noticing spurious? Because if it's real, what's bugging me is, have we seen the basic version of Tezzeret? Because I don't think he has a last name, and there hasn't been a card just called "Tezzeret", but I wonder if maybe Tezzeret the Seeker is intended as his basic version due to you guys not wanting to use a one-word name for a Planeswalker card. (Similarly it seems to me to be obvious that given the circumstances, Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker should count as the basic version of Nicol Bolas... I expect that doesn't apply to Karn, though, due to "Karn Liberated" being a very story-specific name, when he could be e.g. "Karn, Golem Planeswalker". Venser just confuses me and makes me wonder if maybe the pattern really is spurious.)

Thanks for your time,

--Harry

The flavor of bloodthirst doesn't particularly excite me despite how much Wizards seems to think it's full of flavor. But I did enjoy the letter of the week about Planeswalker naming conventions, and reading about how Elspeth was second tier planeswalker in concept and has been bumped up since then.